In addition to simply printing text similarly to a common printer, fiscal printers also have a function for storing and holding payment information (fiscal information) such as the collected tax amount and the total sale amount related to sales transactions of products and services, for example, and are used as cash register printers in POS systems, for example.
Because the fiscal information that must be stored is determined by local law (referred to as “financial regulations” below) and may be used for tax audits, for example, it is stored in fiscal memory devices, which are nonvolatile memory devices that are protected to prevent external access and tampering with stored content.
A fiscal printer typically has a communication control unit that controls communication with a host computer such as a POS system computer, and a memory control unit that controls writing and reading fiscal information in fiscal memory.
The communication control unit has an application CPU with a function for controlling data communication with the host computer. Financial regulations also prohibit the application CPU from directly writing fiscal information to fiscal memory in order to prevent tampering. The memory control unit therefore has a memory control CPU that writes fiscal information to fiscal memory separately from the application CPU.